Peter Elfer

Nurseries and emotional well‐being: evaluating an emotionally containing model of professional development

Despite official endorsement of attachment principles in nursery work, these are often not translated into nursery practice. One possible reason for this is that staff training does not sufficiently address the personal implications and anxieties that childrens attachments may entail for practitioners. Working from a psychoanalytic perspective on organisational functioning and group learning, this paper describes action research with a group of nursery heads who participated in a professional development programme designed specifically to explore emotional experience in professional work. The positive evaluations of the programme by heads and their staff are described including examples of experiential learning and of increased staff awareness about, and responsiveness to, the emotional experience of children. However, the research also concluded that sustained effectiveness of the model is likely to be dependent on an ongoing culture of attention to the emotional experience of nursery staff within nursery umbrella organisations.

Emotion in nursery work: Work Discussion as a model of critical professional reflection

The importance of attention to children’s emotions has been emphasised widely in early care and education research and policy. Enabling such attention has been seen as achieved primarily through attachment interactions with nursery staff. However, there is increasing awareness that faciltiating such interactions in a way that is optimal for children depends in part on staff’s critical professional reflection about how these interactions are managed with children, with family members and between staff themselves. Such professional reflection is seen as needing to include attention to the emotional experience of staff as well as children. This paper reports on Work Discussion as a model of professional reflection that is attentive to emotional experience as it is evoked in professional work. Work Discussion and its theoretical underpinning, a psychoanalytic view of organisational ethos and interaction, is introduced and explained. The paper then reports on a Work Discussion group with nine nursery managers, the issues brought for discussion, the managers’ reports of their experience of the group, and the value of Work Discussion in helping them think about and manage interactions in their nurseries.

Exploring children's expressions of attachment in nursery

SUMMARY Whilst there is broad consensus that the emotional responsiveness and sensitivity of staff are of high importance in interactions with babies and young children in nursery, there is not consensus about how far interactions should be organised to facilitate attachments with particular staff. This paper brings the ‘childs voice’ into this debate by introducing a method of observation that is particularly suited to the observation of childrens emotional responses. Data from observations of two children, aged 12 and 16 months, attending two different nurseries are presented to illustrate the observation method. The paper concludes that this data can be interpreted to show the significance to each of these children of attachment relationships with adults but also the power of group relations in supporting childrens emotional well being.

Emotional aspects of nursery policy and practice – progress and prospect

ABSTRACT This article argues for a turn in early years policy towards more serious attention to the emotional dimensions of nursery organisation and practice. The article describes three developing bodies of research on emotion in nursery, each taking a different theoretical perspective. The central argument of the article is that these three bodies of research converge in their findings on the importance of staff feeling cared about and understood in enabling staff to more effective in thinking about and responding to the individual children with whom they work. The article illustrates how emotion might be taken more seriously through reference to a number of developing practical initiatives arising from these bodies of work.

Psychoanalytic methods of observation as a research tool for exploring young children’s nursery experience

Nurseries play a major role in the lives of many families. This paper argues for the value of psychoanalytic methods of observation as a research tool to explore young children’s interactions and emotional experience in nurseries. The paper reviews what has been learned already about early development using such methods. The second part of the paper illustrates observation data gathered using psychoanalytic methods in nursery research, through the observations of an 18-month-old boy. It uses these data to show the potential of the method in accessing what young children communicate about their nursery experience and in exploring current questions of nursery policy and practice.

Facilitating Intimate and Thoughtful Attention to Infants and Toddlers in Nursery

Infants and toddlers have a well-known and distinctive power to stir up deep emotions in adult caregivers. This capacity and the attuned responsiveness of adults has been conceptualised in different ways: maternal reverie (Bion WR, Learning from experience. Heinemann/Basic Books, London/New York, 1962), attachment (Bowlby J, Attachment. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1969), innate intersubjectivity (Trevarthen C, Aitken K, J Child Psychol Psychiatry Allied Discip 42(1):3–48, 2001) and reflective function (Fonagy P, Attachment theory and psychoanalysis. Other Press, New York, 2001). At home, the way adults respond to infants and toddlers is likely to be deeply instinctive and thoughtful but driven by strong emotion and shaped by the distinctive values and practices of individual families and their cultural contexts. In early years’ settings, the way practitioners respond is likely to be influenced by some of this, but in quite a different way. This chapter is about Work Discussion (WD), a form of professional reflection in which thoughtful attention can be given to the emotional life of early years’ settings, and the details of individual interactions that make up this life. It draws on the findings of three recent studies of WD in the early years. WD is seen as having a particular contribution to understanding and managing the emotional life of settings in a way that can draw on objective and detailed descriptions of interactions and their contexts combined with the subjective experience evoked by these interactions. Such professional reflection matters for the wellbeing of all in the early years’ community: children and families, staff and external advisers, but most of all infants and toddlers themselves.

Love, satisfaction and exhaustion in the nursery: methodological issues in evaluating the impact of Work Discussion groups in the nursery

ABSTRACT The significance of practitioners’ emotions in nursery interactions is evident in vivid accounts from widely different socio-cultural contexts. Work Discussion (WD) is a model of professional reflection distinctive in its attention to emotion in work interactions. Psychoanalytic conceptions, particularly the notion of the defended subject, underpin WD. Enabling participants in WD to discuss subjective work experience in an open way is thus subtle and sensitive. Research has not addressed how the impact of different models of professional reflection may be evaluated. Can WD, with its explicit attention to the emotions evoked at work, strengthen practitioners’ engagement with children and families? This paper critically discusses the complex methodological issues in evaluating the impact of WD on nursery practitioners, children and parents in the nursery. The challenge is to combine the intense subjectivity of WD with an evaluation that is rigorous and objective. Later papers will illustrate data analysis and report findings.

Subtle emotional process in early childhood pedagogy: evaluating the contribution of the Tavistock Observation Method

Abstract Nursery experience is now common for young children and their families. Questions of quality have focussed mainly on safety and early learning. The roles of subtle emotional processes in daily pedagogic interactions have received surprisingly little attention. This paper discusses the Tavistock Observation Method (TOM), a naturalistic method of observation underpinned by psychoanalytic conceptions and in which emotional experience is an integral part of observation narratives. The paper reports on a detailed evaluation of the use of an adapted version of TOM in nurseries in England and the contribution it can make to empirical exploration of emotional processes. A concurrent sister study will report on the use of A-TOM in Australia.